


30 days of night, dark, and cold.

by thychesters



Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Blood, Body Horror, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Gen, Gore, Implied Cannibalism, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Possession, trying to cover all the bases. the usual ud stuff.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-10
Updated: 2017-02-10
Packaged: 2018-09-23 04:00:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9639896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thychesters/pseuds/thychesters
Summary: "She was down here for amonth."She was down there for alone. They left her there, waiting to be found, waiting to die, waiting forsomething.They left her, and she's never been so cold or so hungry in her life.





	

**Author's Note:**

> a [brief] chronicle of hannah's month in the mines as an attempt to get into her character. i'm sure she has much, much happier memories than involve less cold and death. a couple things have been tweaked, but overall this was written over the course of four hours and i hurt myself, lmao.
> 
> cross-posted from tumblr. originally written in 2nd person and then edited to third; sorry if a few things slipped through the cracks! and if you'd like any other tags added, please let me know!

When she wakes up, she are keenly aware of three things: it’s cold, it’s dark, and she is in immense pain. She’s shaking against the ground, as if she’s going to rattle apart, fall to pieces here, here wherever she is, cold and alone, and in the dark. She goes to roll over, goes to sit up, and the pain sets in again, and she screams, chokes on her own spit and hits the ground again. Her head hurts, everything hurts, but the bulk of the pain seems to come from her leg, and part of her is too afraid to look, too afraid to asses the damage.

She realizes she doesn’t have her glasses on — not that it would help much any, squinting in the dark and what little light filters in from way up above. Her head rolls around, an ache at the base of her skull and a throb in her leg as she takes in her surroundings, tries to push aside disorientation for a moment. She’s in a — there was a prank — a stupid, mean — her friends — she ran outside, in the snow, and it was, it was cold, and — and Beth — _Beth_ , oh god — _Beth_ —

Beth.

Her head swings, rolls, aches, and when she spots her she start screaming again, crying and carrying on. She’s facing away from her, sprawled across the ice and dirt, and she’s only unconscious, she thinks, she hope. The fall knocked her out, she has a concussion, please, that has to be it.

It takes far too long for her to drag herself over to her body, her leg limp and useless behind her, every pull too jarring, and by the time she reaches her there are beads of perspiration on her forehead and she wants to puke.

“Beth,” she says, but it’s more a rasp, and she has to clear her throat and try again. “Beth, Beth, hey—”

She doesn’t answer, and her already weak vision blurs again, tears gathering along her lashes. She makes no move to acknowledge her, no move to respond, no move at all. Her lower lip quivers more from just the cold, and she places a dirty, frigid hand on Beth’s chest, lets her palm follow the weak, barely there rise and fall of it.

Hannah choke down a sob, and then she throws her head back.

“HELP. HELP ME. WE’RE DOWN HERE.”

There was man, she remembers. On the ledge. He looked dangerous, told them to run, and they did —

“HELP US. PLEASE.”

Maybe he’s still up there —

_“HELP.”_

She doesn’t know how long she screams for, how much time has passed and her sobs and Beth’s weak breathing has gone unanswered. She screams until her voice grows hoarse and unrecognizable, until she’s sure her throat will bleed and her words are too akin to crying to be decipherable.

She curls up around Beth, yin and yang, intertwining their fingers and making promises she isn’t sure she can keep. _Someone will find you,_ she promises; someone will come.

She doesn’t know how long they lie there for, her head resting against Beth’s shoulder and waiting for her stronger little sister to tell her everything’s going to be alright; for her big brother to come pick them both up, yell at them for scaring him. She cry into her sweater, lets it soak up her tears as she squeeze her hand. This, at the very least, is what little comfort she can provide her.

Her leg hurts.

Her breath peters for a moment, and Han’s pushing herself up in a blind haste, her shin screaming and her hand against her chest as it falters, rising in intervals with more time between each new one than the last.

“Lizzie,” she says, with the nickname their family all used before, and only she was allowed to use now. “Lizzie, Lizzie, no.” Her lip quivers again, a little harder this time, and her tears are the warmest thing in this cavern. “Lizzie, please, you have to hold on, okay. Beth, _please_.”

Her little sister, loud, outspoken, and unapologetic, does not go out in the blaze of glory she so demanded.

She goes out with a gurgle. A weak, stilted breath, and then nothing at all.

Hannah sobs and start screaming again, screaming for Beth, for help, something, anything, and then it’s just a guttural, brutal noise echoing in the space around them.

They hold hands until neither one of them can feel anything anymore.

* * *

Her head is on Beth’s chest, waiting for it to rise again, waiting for her to cough and push her off. She stares straight ahead, gaze fixed on a point she can’t see, and wait for help to come. She let go of her hand some time ago, crossed her hands over her stomach and straightened her body out into a pose that wasn’t so unbecoming. She needs to be presentable when they find her, at least.

She spends the next hour alternating between calling out for help and dragging herself around in circles, crawling around this cave and using her hands to feel her way around. She found her glasses, lens cracked and frame warped, but still viable. Wearing them doesn’t improve the conditions around her and it only makes her sister’s body harder to look at it, so she takes them off and puts them in the pocket of the coat Beth had lent her, always looking out for her big sister. The thought gets her a little warmer, but only marginally. She’d checked for her phone, only to have her hopes dashed once again, and hot tears to coincide with her frustrations. She wouldn’t have had any service, anyway.

She tries to stand up once, use the wall as her support, but then halfway up made the mistake of putting weight on her bad foot. She cries out as she crumples, lands on her butt, and takes some solace in the notion that no one is around to watch what is left of her dignity crumble.

She ends her brief exploration back where she started: by her body, prone where she left her, and props herself up against the rocks they slid down and the rocks that broke her spine, her legs spread out before her. She’d given it a once over earlier, tried to assess the damage, and came to the conclusion that she didn’t need to be a doctor to tell it was broken.

Her head rolls back, gaze following the slope they’d come down. The sun’s out. Somewhere, up there, someone is looking for them — their family, their friends. There’d be a man up there last night, stood before them and that, that _thing_ , and she wonders what’s become of him. He has to be up there, too, looking for them.

Help has to come. Help _will_ come.

For now, she poses vigil over her sister. Against what, she doesn’t know, but it seems to be the least she can do.

* * *

Time passes slowly in the dark, or perhaps it passes too fast to tell. Maybe time doesn’t exist in the dark.

She sits against one of the rocks on the far side of the cave, finds sheet metal and an old drum and wood, and sets to work carving into the rock wall with fingers she can hardly bend. _2.2.14_. the date they fell, and the date Beth died. She judges the days by how many times she’s seen the sun, trying to count the intervals between it. She’s at two tally marks now.

Her stomach hurts. In hindsight, she wishes she’d eaten more the other night.

It’s so cold down here.

* * *

She manages to hobble around, navigates her way out of her cave and ventures further into what she realizes are the mines her parents warned them about when they bought the property, told her and her siblings to avoid and never wander too far, least they fall into them.

That was dad, jokingly.

Fat lot of good that warning did.

She wishes her parents would come find them soon.

She wants to go home.

* * *

Her face is sore from all the crying.

* * *

Her explorations grant her two things: more rocks, and an old water wheel still moving. The water is stagnant and cold and feels like plunging her hands into ice, but she’s desperate and beggars can’t be choosers. She cups her hands, shaking and struggling to hold water, and then she’s dragging herself closer to the edge, sticking her chin right in with unabashed slurping and sputtering. She pulls her head back, hoists herself back onto the ledge, launched into a coughing fit and almost choking. The ends of her hair are soaked, dragging against the collar of the coat that isn’t hers. She shivers again, is always shivering. What a fine time to catch a cold.

Her stomach still hurts, cramps.

She drags herself back to Beth.

While she scratches her next tally in, she thinks about maybe using some of those planks she found as a crutch.

* * *

She hums _Frère Jacques_ to herself, but then the humming gets on her nerves.

* * *

One time, she remembers, back when she was maybe seven or eight, she and her family came up to the lodge for a winter getaway, back before dad got too busy and mom didn’t have people pulling her in five different directions. She’d been out exploring the grounds with her siblings, been told not to go too far by her mother and to be back in an hour for lunch. Josh had wanted to go back early, never one for the cold, but then Beth had stuck her lip out and said no, she wanted to go a little farther. And Hannah, ever in tandem with her sister, had agreed.

They’d gotten lost, of course. Dad had found them not too far from where they’d started, come running at her yelling for him. He’d found her crying and snotty, her siblings upset. He’d scooped her up, bundled them all inside, and she’d curled up in front of the fire and against his side, wrapped up in blankets.

She wishes her dad would come find her again.

Every girl’s father is her hero, right?

She takes Beth’s sweater. She think about her socks, too, but she has to leave her with something when they find them.

She’s warmer now, but she’s still hungry.

* * *

She spends her time crying out for help, crying, and crying so hard she either pukes or falls asleep.

* * *

Six tallies. Maybe help isn’t coming.

* * *

On her next exploration she finds old paper and charcoal in the middle of what looks like the remnants of an old mining operation. The sight of an elevator draws up what hope she has left in her, though that’s quickly dashed when she finds that it doesn’t work. She hobbles slowly from one end of the cave to the other, finds nothing of real use to her, and any plans of climbing the unstable looking ladder are also nixed when her leg throbs again.

By the time she makes it back to her sister she’s ready to collapse from exhaustion. She props herself up on her rock, drawing in deep lungfuls of air that still bite and sting.

Her gaze falls on Beth, as it always does, and she’s almost too tired to cry.

It’s cold, but not cold enough. But it’s not … It’s not right. None of this is right.

This is all so, so wrong.

She has to bury her body.

* * *

She doesn’t know how long it takes her to drag her body, how many times she has to stop and catch her breath, because she’s not overtly weak, but she’s not the strongest person in the world, either. It would be easier if it were Matt doing it, or Mike, or even Sam —

— no, she’s not supposed to think about them. Because thinking about them means she's going to cry again, means she’s going to fixate on what they did, on the last things they said to each other, how none of them came out after her, only her sister, and look at what happened to her.

They shouldn’t have gone up there in the first place.

It takes her maybe two hours to drag her to the lake she found, the one she comes to during her wanderings every four hours, plunge her face in and uses it to mask her sobs as she drinks water she probably shouldn’t.

She tries to clean her up a little, make her look presentable.

She doesn’t have a shovel.

* * *

In the end she’s missing a fingernail and her hands are torn and bloody. She can hardly feel them, so the pain there fades and doesn’t matter so much.

She collects wood from her original findings, and her rock she uses for the tallies. At first she smears blood on her makeshift grave marker, but realizes writing her name in blood is too morbid.

She kisses her cheek, offers her one last broken apology, and says her goodbye.

She falls asleep curled up on her grave.

* * *

She forgets to keep up with her tallies for a little while. There isn't much of anything new to journal.

Her stomach has never hurt so much.

* * *

She wonders if help is still coming.

* * *

Growing up she was never really a religious person. Grandma was Catholic and made her go to mass when she went to visit, but she never really got into it. She’d spent her time letting her gaze wander the church when they weren't sent off to Sunday school. One time Josh got in trouble for bringing his GameBoy. One time Beth fell asleep.

But she starts to pray, just a little. She prays for her sister, mostly. Sometimes that she’ll come back, sometimes that she’s okay, is hopefully someplace better than this; for her family, for them to find her.

Sometimes, on the darker nights where her solitude creeps up on more so than usual, she prays that she falls asleep and doesn’t wake up.

At least neither she nor her sister would be alone.

* * *

She’s going to die here, most likely.

Maybe that’d be okay.

* * *

Josh has always been a messy eater. There’s barbecue sauce smeared across his cheek, and he uses his arm as a napkin, much to the chagrin of their mother. Beth rolls her eyes, and Hannah can tell she kicks him under the table when he grunts, earns another sigh from mom, even though she’s smiling.

“ _Children_ , behave,” she says, and she finds she’s missed her voice, though she can’t say for certain why. She’s at the table on the back deck overlooking the backyard, all lush and green and so well-manicured it might as well be a prototype for _Good Housekeeping._ The palm trees in the back only serve to emulate that, all warm California sun and just enough of a breeze. She closes her eyes and take a breath, wants to capture this moment forever and never let it go.

“Han?”

She opens her eyes again and turns to find her dad standing there, smiling down at her and his eyes crinkling in the corners. “You hungry?” She feels like she could cry so she only nods, throat tight and voice too thick for anything intelligible.

“Thanks, dad,” she chokes out after a minute, after he’s set a plate before her and settles back in his own chair. He reaches over to squeeze her forearm, and Josh beams at her from across the table.

She glances down and almost gags at the pile of bloody, raw meat before her, and flinches away from it in with a hiss of indignation.

“Dad! If this is some stupid prank —”

“What’s wrong?” Beth asks, and when she looks up her scowl shifts to confusion, to horror when she finds her brother’s shirt smeared with blood, picking his teeth with his nails. Mom’s sucking it off her index finger like it’s her last meal, and dad’s happily digging into the raw flesh on his plate with aplomb, looking none the wiser. She turns back to Beth, about to ask her what’s happening, why are they doing this, _what kind of sick joke_ —

“Stop screaming, you’ll bother the neighbors,” mom chides, and then she’s plunging her hand into a rack of raw ribs that don’t look like any she’s seen before.

“Yeah,” Josh says, and she’s hardly paying him any mind when Beth sits up and pokes at a slit in her stomach, and Hannah pushes away, clambering to her feet and her chair falling back as guts spill out across her lap, looking as if they’ve been picked at, chewed on. “Ah yeah, dessert.”

She stumbles back, just about tripping over her chair, watching, aghast, as Beth hands her kidney over to her mother, looking happy as-all-get-out, like an All-American cookie cutter family sharing a tray of brownies and otherwise oblivious to her horror and revulsion.

“What — what are you — what the —” she gets out, taking a few shaking steps back as fight or flight kicks in and she fails to process.

“What?” Beth asks. “Aren’t you hungry?”

“Don’t — don’t you —”

“ _Shh_ ,” dad whispers, and she barely has time to register his hands cupping her throat before the resounding crackle and snap of her neck.

* * *

She wakes up screaming, flailing and ignoring any and all signs of pain as it comes out in one long, drawn out, terrified wail. Her chest rises and falls too rapidly, and she can’t catch her breath. She tears Beth’s coat off, hurls it across the cavern, and presses her back up against the rocks she props herself up against every night. It’s too cold and she can’t breathe, can’t even think.

She turns to vomit and only dry heaves, body sore and with nothing to offer up save for bile and bits of dirty water.

It isn’t until she’s calmed down some that the pain in her arm registers, and she glances down to find bloody bite marks, indents from where she’s been chewing at her own arm and gnawing at the finger where she’s missing a nail. She’s missing two now. She wasn’t before.

She tries to throw up again, feels blood — her own — at the back of her throat.

She lies against the cold, hard ground in spit, blood, and tears.

Her stomach gurgles.

* * *

_Who are you?_

She shoots away from where she’s been carving her latest tally, number twenty-two, like she’s been burned. She waits for another sound, another hint, something to tell her that she’s isn’t just making things up to comfort herself.

“H-hello?” she ventures, voice hoarse and rough from lack of use. She swallows, clears her throat, and tries again: “Is — is someone there?”

_Hello?_

She could cry, cry like she has been for the past few days, weeks, now, only for different reasons entirely.

“Yes — yes, I’m over here! please.” She scrambles, tries to keep upright and all only falters, like she’s on newborn limbs and can’t tell which way is up. “My name’s Hannah Washington — my sister and I, we, we fell. She didn’t — she didn’t make it. Please, please help me, I —”

Relief and hope swells up, and she can’t even see straight, her tears one of the warmest things in this cave of hers, and she lets out a laugh.

_Hello?_

“I’m here, I’m here!” She’s on her hands and knees — one of them. Her other leg trails after her; it doesn’t hurt as much any more and still hasn’t healed quite right. The socks she ended up taking from Beth didn’t prove much use with the tourniquet made of old wood and knots she hadn’t been able to tighten with fingers that didn’t bend all the way. “I’m over here! I’m over here!”

She’s crawling now, half-delirious and trying to pinpoint the source of the voice that’s coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

“Thank god you found me; I didn’t think anyone was coming — please, you have to help me.” She makes it to the mouth of the cave, a short jaunt from where she buried Beth. “My sister, we have to get my sister —”

_Hello?_

“Yes, I’m over here!” she shouts again, crying harder. “Please, _please_.”

They don’t answer again for a while, for how long she doesn’t know, and she lies on her side, squinting around in the dark because she left her glasses in the coat and never bothered to hunt for them again after she threw it.

“Where are you?”

_Hello?_

They’re farther away now, crossed over into some other tunnel away from her, and she doesn’t have it in her to chase after them in away way, shape, or form. She’d run, if she could, if she didn’t lack any forms of willpower to get up. The only adrenaline she has is keeping her from freezing to death, though perhaps that’s not how it works.

“No, _no_ , please, come back!”

The only sound in the cavern is the water lapping against rock, a steady, monotonous sound that provides her no aid.

This time when she screams it’s in rage.

* * *

Help isn’t coming.

* * *

She thinks of every curse word she knows, every word she wasn’t allowed to say as a child.

“Shit! Fuck! Bitch, god damn!” Her own voice echoes along the walls, shouts right along with her. “Bastard! Piss — _pissant!_ Whatever the fuck that is!”

She slams her fists into the dirt like a child; an angry, cold, lost little child full of resentment.

“Motherfucker! Mother — motherfucker cocksucker!”

Her rage keeps her warm, keeps her heart pounding and the blood roaring in her ears. Her sister is dead and she had to bury her with her bare hands. She didn’t even get a proper funeral service. Her brother is an asshole and had to get drunk because apparently he can’t have fun otherwise. Her friends are all mean-spirited people who get off on mocking her, and her former crush is an asshole, dick, douchebag who doesn’t deserve any woman. Her best friend couldn’t even stand up for her and probably finds the whole ordeal funny.

She’s going to die here, alone, because no one cares enough to come find her.

And she’s so fucking hungry.

It’s their fault she’s here.

“FUCK YOU!”

* * *

She’s never been so hungry in her life.

* * *

When she laughs, it borders on hysterical. It is.

She almost pisses herself.

* * *

She sucks on some rocks.

Eating dirt proves not to be the best idea, and she chokes before dunking her head in the lake, sucking up water. That’s the only thing she has going for her.

She thinks about shimming her way into the lake and sliding under the surface, never to come up.

* * *

Why doesn’t anyone care?

* * *

“ _Frère Jacque, Frère Jacque, dormez-vous? dormez-vous?_ ” She sing to herself, lying on her side and dragging her fingers through the dirt in aimless shapes and doodles. She’s surprised she even has the energy to do that anymore, let alone anything at all.

She doesn’t cry anymore, almost like she can’t. Her eyes are too dry and she doesn’t think her body has it in it to produce any more tears.

“ _Sonnez les matines, sonnez les matines_ …”

_Hello?_

She freezes, pauses in her ministrations and mid-song to tilt her head up minutely, trying to pinpoint the source again, so desperately wishing it wasn’t just her mind playing tricks on her.

“I’m over here,” she whispers, lets that be all she offers it.

_I know where you are; I see you._

“Where are you?” she asks, though she wishes she’d thought to demand to know where they are, where they went last time. The voice sounds vaguely familiar, an inflection in the back of her mind that she can’t quite recall.

_I can help you._

“Please,” she starts and trail off. She picks up again, least they wander off and leave her alone once more. “Please, I just want to go home.”

_I’ll help you, I promise._

“Please,” she says again. “Please, just help me. Please.”

She pushes up onto her elbows, drawn and weak and sore, though the pain may be all in her head at this point. The cold doesn’t hurt so much, not when she can’t really feel it. She squints into the darkness, eyelids heavy and her vision still beyond blurred.

_Shh, shh, it’s alright. I’ll protect you._

“Okay, okay,” she whispers, and there’s an eerie sense of calm about the place. She’s tired and cold, and in no position to argue, as much as part of her may want to. She’s so hungry, and her stomach gurgles louder. She sits up, props herself up against the rock and lets it leech what remains of the warmth in the sweater that isn’t hers.

Tired, hungry, afraid. That’s her. That’s what remains of her.

_I will make you stronger._

It isn’t until the voice has faded and she’s on the cusp of unconsciousness that she realizes the voice sounds remarkably like her mother’s.

* * *

She wakes up curled over Beth’s grave.

She pushes away, skittering through dirt and dust and loose rocks, nearly falling all over herself. She comes to visit her every day; say a few words, clamber back to her post to watch the sun before she makes her tally, and then wanders until her leg gives out. All-in-all it’s quite taxing, but she cannot risk getting too far from her sister. She needs her here, in the event that they’re found.

She doesn’t remember falling asleep by her grave.

She doesn’t remember much of anything, too consumed by hunger and fatigue. Her fingers feel too brittle, like they’d snap off alongside the rest of her bones, and whoever does find her, eventually, will stumble upon her frozen body before unearthing her dead sister. Together in life, together in death. She suppose it’s fitting.

She isn’t alone. Or she is, with nothing but the thoughts that are too jarring and unnerving.

_I will make you stronger._

“I want to get out of here,” she whispers, arms bent before her and hands curled in on themselves. She should have gotten Beth’s jacket. “I want to go home.”

_I will protect you. You will not feel cold, you will not suffer._

What she doesn’t say is that maybe it would better at this point if she could feel a whole lot of nothing at all. Right now what nerve endings aren’t shot consist of cold and pain. She wonders at how much frostbite and hypothermia has set in.

“Leave me alone,” she says. Help isn’t coming. For the first time in the past few days her eyes start to well up again, granting her with blurred vision and the reminder that it’s been a month. It’s been a month and no one has cared to come find her, no one has come down to bundle her up and take her home, made promises of protection they can keep.

_I will. I am here for you. I will help you, protect you._

“Stop it.” She’s talking to herself. There’s no one else there, just her and her cold, dead sister, under a foot of loose dirt in a half-assed grave. That should be her, too. She can’t even die properly.

_She would want you to be strong._

They don’t know anything about Beth, anything about her. She just wants to go home.

She wants her sister.

Her stomach growls.

_She wants you to be strong. You will do that for her._

She’s been chewing on her fingers again, left the tips numb and bloody, like raw meat. The sight and remnants of the taste on the back of her tongue makes her gag. This has been happening more often that not.

In her sleep and energy-addled state she’s been dragging her other hand across her forearm, digging until the rough nails draw up tiny rivulets that she watches in fascination, licks the pads of her fingertips until it registers.

_She would not want you to suffer. She will protect you._

It’s wrong. It’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong, it’s wrong, nothing about this is right. She feels like she’s watching herself from outside of her own body, hovering over the limp, gnarled form that was once her, hunched over her sister’s grave with more contemplation than saying a few words in her memory.

“No!”

She scuttles away, pushes herself across the ground with the heels of her palms. She has had some terrible thoughts in this mines, but never anything like this. Never anything so horrid, that’s had bile creeping up with the back of her throat and a wretched cry pulled from her.

_You must survive._

“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” she gets out, carrying on with unintelligible noises until she’s put enough distance between her and the water, her and her sister. Desperate times call for desperate measures, but she would much rather welcome her own death than such desecration.

Beth would want her to be strong, but not like this. Never like this.

_I will never leave you._

* * *

There are thirty tallies. It’s been a month. She will die here.

The charcoal is too hard to hold and she can’t properly chronicle the story of her death on the scraps she’d found back at the mining station. She can’t write a will, can’t properly say goodbye.

She can offer apologies, but she will never receive forgiveness.

Her sister will always protect her.

* * *

She starts digging.


End file.
